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Six months ago, Congress passed the Aircraft Passenger Whole-Body Imaging Limitations Act, which would restrict the use of so-called “strip-search machines” at the nation’s airports, thus protecting the all-important digitized nudity of the flying public. Now that a pampered prep-school loser has successfully smuggled explosives in his underwear, I'm betting Congress will back away from this silly defense of abstract notions of privacy.
The installation of ten of these machines at a few airports provoked outrage among the sorts of no-doubt unappetizing folks nobody wants to see naked anyway. What these folks fail to understand is that there's nothing quite as unsexy as yet another image of a naked body to someone who looks at them all day. Ask any doctor. You stop getting turned on sometime in pre-med classes. Seen one, seen em all – unless there's some fascinating anomaly of medical interest.
How people can get worked up over this is beyond me. We might as well demand the x-ray technicians close their eyes at the hospital, so our skeletal privacy isn't invaded. Or maybe we should follow nineteenth-century Chinese traditions and point to where it hurts on little dolls, so doctors won't shatter the privacy of our skin.
But what's really nuts about this reaction is that about half of all Americans agree to have their urine tested for drugs at work. If researchers have proven that a joint smoked on Friday night can impair function on Monday morning, they're keeping the news to themselves. Still, with no valid scientific or moral justification, employers across the country are testing workers of all kinds, and firing those who come up positive. Urine, or you're out.
Similarly, nobody denies that the Bush administration began a program of warrantless wiretapping of phone calls and emails of private citizens that was utterly, arrogantly illegal. This went on for years, and is still going on, yet aside from a few dumbfounded constitutional scholars and left-wing scolds, nobody seems to care much.
When Americans have allowed the snooping eyes and ears of government into their supposedly private communications and agreed to pee in a cup for their boss, where's the sense in freaking out because the bored TSA guy at the airport knows you're wearing an underwire bra?
